This self-contained book provides three fundamental and generic approaches (logical, probabilistic, and modal) to representing and reasoning with agent epistemic states, specifically in the context of decision making. Each of these approaches can be applied to the construction of intelligent software agents for making decisions, thereby creating computational foundations for decision-making agents. In addition, the book introduces a formal integration of the three approaches into a single unified approach that combines the advantages of all the approaches. Finally, the symbolic argumentation approach to decision making developed in this book, combining logic and probability, offers several advantages over the traditional approach to decision making which is based on simple rule-based expert systems or expected utility theory.
This self-contained book provides three fundamental and generic approaches (logical, probabilistic, and modal) to representing and reasoning with agent epistemic states, specifically in the context of decision making. Each of these approaches can be applied to the construction of intelligent software agents for making decisions, thereby creating computational foundations for decision-making agents. In addition, the book introduces a formal integration of the three approaches into a single unified approach that combines the advantages of all the approaches. Finally, the symbolic argumentation approach to decision making developed in this book, combining logic and probability, offers several advantages over the traditional approach to decision making which is based on simple rule-based expert systems or expected utility theory.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, PAAMS 2015, held in Salamanca, Spain, in June 2015. The 10 revised full papers and 9 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions are presented together with 17 demonstrations. The articles report on the application and validation of agent-based models, methods and technologies in a number of key application areas, including: agents and the energy grid, agents and the traffic grid, affective computing and agent development, ambient and contextual agents, social simulation and social networks and other agent-based applications.
With the recent proliferation of service-oriented architectures (SOA), cloud computing technologies, and distributed-interconnected systems, distributed fusion is taking on a larger role in a variety of applications—from environmental monitoring and crisis management to intelligent buildings and defense. Drawing on the work of leading experts around the world, Distributed Data Fusion for Network-Centric Operations examines the state of the art of data fusion in a distributed sensing, communications, and computing environment. Get Insight into Designing and Implementing Data Fusion in a Distributed Network Addressing the entirety of information fusion, the contributors cover everything from signal and image processing, through estimation, to situation awareness. In particular, the work offers a timely look at the issues and solutions involving fusion within a distributed network enterprise. These include critical design problems, such as how to maintain a pedigree of agents or nodes that receive information, provide their contribution to the dataset, and pass to other network components. The book also tackles dynamic data sharing within a network-centric enterprise, distributed fusion effects on state estimation, graph-theoretic methods to optimize fusion performance, human engineering factors, and computer ontologies for higher levels of situation assessment. A comprehensive introduction to this emerging field and its challenges, the book explores how data fusion can be used within grid, distributed, and cloud computing architectures. Bringing together both theoretical and applied research perspectives, this is a valuable reference for fusion researchers and practitioners. It offers guidance and insight for those working on the complex issues of designing and implementing distributed, decentralized information fusion.
The book explores object and situation fusion processes with an appropriate handling of uncertainties, and applies cutting-edge artificial intelligence and emerging technologies like particle filtering, spatiotemporal clustering, net-centricity, agent formalism, and distributed fusion together with essential Level 1 techniques and Level 1/2 interactions.
Learn How to Properly Use the Latest Analytics Approaches in Your Organization Computational Business Analytics presents tools and techniques for descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics applicable across multiple domains. Through many examples and challenging case studies from a variety of fields, practitioners easily see the connections to their own problems and can then formulate their own solution strategies. The book first covers core descriptive and inferential statistics for analytics. The author then enhances numerical statistical techniques with symbolic artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques for richer predictive and prescriptive analytics. With a special emphasis on methods that handle time and textual data, the text: Enriches principal component and factor analyses with subspace methods, such as latent semantic analyses Combines regression analyses with probabilistic graphical modeling, such as Bayesian networks Extends autoregression and survival analysis techniques with the Kalman filter, hidden Markov models, and dynamic Bayesian networks Embeds decision trees within influence diagrams Augments nearest-neighbor and k-means clustering techniques with support vector machines and neural networks These approaches are not replacements of traditional statistics-based analytics; rather, in most cases, a generalized technique can be reduced to the underlying traditional base technique under very restrictive conditions. The book shows how these enriched techniques offer efficient solutions in areas, including customer segmentation, churn prediction, credit risk assessment, fraud detection, and advertising campaigns.
The Handbook of Modal Logic contains 20 articles, which collectively introduce contemporary modal logic, survey current research, and indicate the way in which the field is developing. The articles survey the field from a wide variety of perspectives: the underling theory is explored in depth, modern computational approaches are treated, and six major applications areas of modal logic (in Mathematics, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Game Theory, and Philosophy) are surveyed. The book contains both well-written expository articles, suitable for beginners approaching the subject for the first time, and advanced articles, which will help those already familiar with the field to deepen their expertise. Please visit: http://people.uleth.ca/~woods/RedSeriesPromo_WP/PubSLPR.html - Compact modal logic reference - Computational approaches fully discussed - Contemporary applications of modal logic covered in depth
An introduction to decision making under uncertainty from a computational perspective, covering both theory and applications ranging from speech recognition to airborne collision avoidance. Many important problems involve decision making under uncertainty—that is, choosing actions based on often imperfect observations, with unknown outcomes. Designers of automated decision support systems must take into account the various sources of uncertainty while balancing the multiple objectives of the system. This book provides an introduction to the challenges of decision making under uncertainty from a computational perspective. It presents both the theory behind decision making models and algorithms and a collection of example applications that range from speech recognition to aircraft collision avoidance. Focusing on two methods for designing decision agents, planning and reinforcement learning, the book covers probabilistic models, introducing Bayesian networks as a graphical model that captures probabilistic relationships between variables; utility theory as a framework for understanding optimal decision making under uncertainty; Markov decision processes as a method for modeling sequential problems; model uncertainty; state uncertainty; and cooperative decision making involving multiple interacting agents. A series of applications shows how the theoretical concepts can be applied to systems for attribute-based person search, speech applications, collision avoidance, and unmanned aircraft persistent surveillance. Decision Making Under Uncertainty unifies research from different communities using consistent notation, and is accessible to students and researchers across engineering disciplines who have some prior exposure to probability theory and calculus. It can be used as a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in fields including computer science, aerospace and electrical engineering, and management science. It will also be a valuable professional reference for researchers in a variety of disciplines.
